1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a printer and a printing method, and more particularly, to a printer and a printing method in which received e-mail is stored in a memory area allocated to each user, and the stored e-mail is confirmed through an authentication procedure.
2. Description of the Related Art
A printer having an e-mail receiving function is referred to as an e-mail printing device. The e-mail printing device has both an e-mail receiving function and an e-mail printing function.
FIG. 1 is a schematic diagram of a printing system with a printer having a conventional e-mail receiving function. The printing system 100 of FIG. 1 has mail clients, mail sending servers 1, 2, mail receiving servers 10, 20, and a printer 30 having an e-mail receiving function.
Mail clients and mail sending servers 1, 2 (i.e., sources) use a Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) to send and receive e-mail. Mail receiving servers 10, 20 and the printer 30 (i.e., destinations) use Post Office Protocol Version 3 (POP3) to send and receive e-mail.
The printer 30 having an e-mail receiving function accesses each mail server 10, 20, and receives the e-mail. Then, the received e-mail is printed through the printer 30 according to the accessing order of the mail servers 10, 20. For example, it is assumed that the printer 30 sets N user accounts, and receives e-mail from the mail servers 10, 20 at a predetermined access time (for example, an hour). If it is the predetermined access time, the printer 30 accesses a first mail server 10, receives e-mail, and prints the received e-mail. The printer 30 repeats this process for the remaining mail servers to the N-th mail server 20. The conventional printer 30 only temporarily stores the received e-mail so as to print the e-mail, but does not store received e-mail in a separate storage device.
Then, if it is the next access time, such as, if an hour passes after the printer 30 last accessed each server 10, 20 according to the accessing order, the printer 30 again accesses each server 10, 20 according to the accessing order, receives the incoming e-mail, and prints the received e-mail. Therefore, e-mail received in each server 10, 20 is sequentially printed through the printer 30.
However, since the conventional printer 30 receives e-mail from preset user accounts without any condition and prints the received e-mail, e-mail for each user account cannot be distinguished. Also, since there are no security mechanism for the e-mail received by the printer 30, anybody can read the printed e-mail.